Friday, August 26, 2016

Immigration

There was always only one sensible position on immigration: ensuring that legal immigration was meritocratic, diverse, and measured to facilitate rapid assimilation and integration — while ending illegal immigration entirely through a mixture of new border fencing/stepped-up patrolling, increased visa and refugee scrutiny, employer fines, and rapid deportation of those who committed serious misdemeanors and felonies, had no work history, were always on government support, or who had arrived within the last one to two years on the scent of amnesty.

No one knows how many of the supposed 11 million (an ossified figure from the 1990s) here illegally, in contrast, have never been convicted of a crime, are employed and not on state support, and have proven residence, say, beyond four to five years. Perhaps 70 percent of the proverbial 11 million might fit that qualifying category?